Michelle Obama Award will honor student memoir writers
NEW YORK, Oct 13, (AP): A literary honor will now carry the name of a uniquely successful author: the Michelle Obama Award for Memoir.
On Wednesday, Penguin Random House announced the retitling of the prize in its decades-old Creative Writing Awards program, which also includes categories named for Amanda Gorman (poetry) and Maya Angelou (spoken word). Each year, the Obama prize will provide a $10,000 college scholarship to a high school senior in public school, based on an autobiographical English-language composition.
Obama’s memoir “Becoming” was published in 2018 and has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, by far the most popular book by a modern White House resident. The former first lady’s next book, “The Light We Carry,” comes out next month.
“I know firsthand how nerve-wracking it can be to share the most intimate stories from your life with the world,” Obama said in a statement released by Penguin Random House.
“But after publishing my memoir ‘Becoming,’ I’ve learned that writing your own story can be a powerful tool. When we share the whole of ourselves, we offer others the opportunity to not only see us as we are, but maybe even think about themselves in a new way,” she said. “This allows us to harness the things that set us apart and helps us see the world as the nuanced, messy, beautiful place that it is. That’s why I am so excited about this new award, and I can’t wait to read what this next generation of young writers will share with us all.”
The Creative Writing Awards program was established in 1993 and has given more than $2.8 million to public high school students. The awards are now co-administered with the grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books.
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Gayl Jones’ “The Birdcatcher,” a short, lyrical novel about a writer’s trip to Ibiza and the gifted, unstable couple she stays with, is a National Book Award finalist for fiction.
The nonprofit National Book Foundation has announced five finalists in each of five competitive categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people’s literature and translated books — winnowed from the 10 longlisted last month.
Nominees include the activist and former Olympics gold medalist Tommie Smith, a young people’s literature nominee for “Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice,” co-authored with Derrick Barnes and Dawud Anyabwile. Sharon Olds, whose previous honors include the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award, is a poetry finalist for “Balladz,” and “His Name Is George Floyd,” by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, is a nonfiction nominee.
Jones, author of the acclaimed “Corregidora” and six other previous works of fiction, is the most established writer in a category that features three debut novels.
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Nominees for translated books include the 2018 winners, Japanese author Yoko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani, for the novel “Scattered All Over the Earth.”
Winners, each receiving $10,000, will be announced Nov. 16 during a dinner benefit in Manhattan, in person for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began. The previously announced honorary prizes will be presented to cartoonist Art Spiegelman and Tracie D. Hall, the executive director of the American Library Association.
Each category’s nominees are selected by panels of five, with judges including authors, editors, booksellers and other members of the literary community. Altogether, publishers submitted 1,772 works, including 607 nonfiction books and 463 fiction books.
Out of the 25 books nominated Tuesday, 10 were released by Penguin Random House — the country’s largest trade publisher — and one by Simon & Schuster, which Penguin is attempting to buy. The U.S. Department of Justice has sued to block the merger, alleging the new company would reduce competition and drive down author advances. A judge’s decision is expected this fall.
Fiction nominees besides “The Birdcatcher” include three literary debuts: Tess Gunty’s “The Rabbit Hutch,” Sarah Thankam Mathews’ “All This Could Be Different” and Alejandro Varela’s “The Town of Babylon.” Jamil Jan Kochai is a finalist for his second book of fiction, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.”